A Review of Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism
Below is a critical review I wrote of Nick Srnicek’s 2016 book Platform Capitalism. It is highly cited and influential among academic and policy-making circles, so I criticized how it conceives of the people who operate and use the internet. In spite of my criticism, it was enjoyable and definitely worth a read for anyone interested in digital platforms.
Somewhere, somehow writing this post has created data. Various platforms have tracked its brainstorming, research, editing, drafting, and reading; platforms have expanded the market to commodify new social space. This is “platform capitalism,” the subject of Nick Srnicek’s book of the same name. Platform Capitalism is an intellectual work. It seeks to fill gaps in the literature and contains a political agenda; I review the book in this light. To briefly summarize, Srnicek analyzes platforms through the lens of critical political economy. Though novel as a business model, they are not mere outgrowths of changing technology but instead bound up in recent economic history, especially the outsourcing of labor (Srnicek 2016, 9-10). Furthermore, they are economic actors who must maximize profit and conform to the imperatives of a capitalist mode of production (Srnicek 2016, 1). As a result, platforms possess behavioral tendencies which are highly problematic (2016, 50-51). While very insightful, I see deep problems with this intellectual approach to studying platforms. As I will demonstrate, Srnicek’s political economy assumes a very deterministic and rigid model of capitalism and social relations. These assumptions systematically bias his analytical focus toward firms and away from other important social actors who are part of the platform. To Srnicek, while firms dynamically change with technology, the worker and user appear to be static. This limited conceptualization leads to a simplistic theory of social relations under platform capitalism; my review of Platform Capitalism rests on this criticism. I first problematize Srniek’s general understanding of capitalism, then identify flaws this framework creates in his analysis of workers and users, and conclude by teasing out the impact these issues have on Platform Capitalism as an intellectual work.
As with many Marxist political economists, Srnicek’s reading of platform capitalism is very clear and logical. This clarity, however, belies a determinism which rests on very strong assumptions about capitalism and its operation. For starters, Srnicek views the capitalist mode of production as possessing “certain invariant features, which function as broad parameters for any given historical period”’ (Srnicek 2016, 5-7). The central feature is a social relations predicated off of private property, which leads to a generalized market dependency and an imperative to cut costs (Srnicek 2016, 5-7). The capitalist economies analyzed in the book--the manufacturing downturn, dot.com bubble, and housing crisis--are all fundamentally the same, and the conditions which brought about the platform are explained in these terms. Specifically, international market competition forced capitalists to break unions and outsource jobs in order to cut costs (Srnicek 2016, 9-10). The trend toward outsourcing reached a peak after the housing crisis, and extended unemployment created a large “surplus population” which forms the basis of the gig economy (Srnicek 2016, 17). In short, Srnicek reads social relations as governed by the transhistorical imperatives of capitalism. The only thing novel about platform capitalism is data and the rise of a new business model to exploit it (Srnicek 2016, 22-24). This reasoning explains why the vast majority of Platform Capitalism focuses on firms and market competition, and it is the foundation for its simplistic account of recent social relations.
This problem of determinism manifests most clearly in Srnicek's analysis of the actual human beings embedded within the social relations of the platform. He considers these groups sporadically, and he generally understands them through the familiar concepts of “worker” and “user.” Probably reflecting popular criticisms of platforms like Uber, he usually discusses the worker when considering the “lean” type of platforms. In these sections, his analysis loses much of its sophistication, and the limitations of his deterministic view of capitalism are obvious. For instance, though he decries lean platforms’ exploitation of workers, he still understands their situation as merely a continuation of the “broader and longer outsourcing trend, which took hold in the 1970s” (2016, 41). Lean platforms operate by outsourcing as much cost as possible, and this causal story explains the struggle of their workers along with the service workers of earlier decades (Srnicek 2016, 44). When unique forms of oppression crop up, for example, the “gendered and racist biases” of by recommendation systems and the “mislabelling” of workers as independent contractors (Srnicek 2016, 41), he cannot account for them beyond the familiar story of cutting costs. The obviously social elements of discriminatory algorithms and legal working classification are unintelligible. His commitment to rigid assumptions about capitalism in general lead him to overlook the important oppressions of platform capitalism in particular. For a theorist following the tradition of Marx, it is damning that he does not mention the worker in his entire elaboration of industrial platforms!
A similar poverty of thought applies to his understanding of users. Srnicek puzzles over this group, which he implicitly distinguishes from workers in a very interesting section on whether social interaction online is “labour” (2016, 29-30). His analysis is revealing. Drawing on Marx, he concludes that user-generated data is not “an activity that generates a surplus value within a context of markets for labour and a production process oriented towards exchange” and is therefore excluded from “all the standard capitalist imperatives” (Srnicek 2016, 29). Srnicek categorically minimizes capitalism’s influence upon online social interaction because it fails to meet a definition of labor inherited from Marx’s analysis of an older economic context. He cannot square the social relations of platforms with his rigid framework of capitalism. But users must generate surplus value, so he makes a clever intellectual move: focusing on data (Srnicek 2016, 31). This choice sidesteps the problem of user labor but comes at the cost of reifying what Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias call “data relations” (2019, 337). In contrast to Srnicek, Couldry and Mejias follow Moishe Postone in adopting a “social theory” of Marxism, which holds that capitalism abstracts much of everyday social relations into a commodity (Couldry and Mejias 2019, 342-343; Postone 1998). Couldry and Mejias apply this social theory to platforms, which commodifies digital social interactions. The attention of a user becomes abstractly conceptualized as a legitimate source of surplus value (2019, 342-343). Srnicek implicitly assumes the rationalities of data relations, that is, surplus value is “just there” as an abstract commodity, data, to be refined. Reflecting this logic, he conceives of data as a “raw material that must be extracted, and the activities of users to be the natural source of this raw material” (Srnicek 2016, 23). The watchword of ‘network effects’ takes this even further. Network effects to Srnicek are “a cycle whereby more users beget more users, which leads to platforms having a natural tendency towards monopolisation. It also lends platforms a dynamic of ever-increasing access to more activities, and therefore to more data.” (Srnicek 2016, 25). The implicit frame is of users as platform assets, which tellingly is never questioned because of difficult questions begged about user exploitation. It is easier to simply adopt a naturalizing frame of data rather than view it as a “thing” produced when platforms commodify social relations online (Couldry and Mejias 2019, 338). Srnicek sees with the gaze of the market: he uncritically views people caught up within data relations as “users” and data as a “natural” resource. This critical deficiency is downstream of his strong assumptions about capitalism and underpins my fundamental critique of Platform Capitalism.
But what does all this mean for Platform Capitalism? I maintain that a robust theory of capitalism ought to contain a systematic reasoning for why market relations should be rejected. In his day, Marx painstakingly constructed a comprehensive theory of proletarian oppression under capitalism which was the moral case for his political agenda. Platform Capitalism is similarly ideological. Srnicek seeks to better the lot of laborers and ultimately bring platforms within public control (2016, 71-72), yet he thinks in the language of platform capitalism. He sees laborers as workers and everyday people as users. He ends the book seemingly more concerned about monopolization than any real harm to the humans exploited by platforms (Srnicek, 71). For these reasons, Platform Capitalism is unpersuasive. It does not do enough to justify its concern about and proffered solution to the harms of platform capitalism. Srnicek does not adequately account for the ways platforms reconfigure social relations, so the most he can do is reaffirm an already common concern about industry concentration. The theories of other platform scholars by contrast are much more compelling. The aforementioned notion of data relations include a powerful elaboration of its harm to the “minimal integrity of the self” (Couldry and Mejias 2019, 345). This thinking is more persuasive because it flexibly draws on both Marx and other sociological theories to examine the negative social consequences of platforms. Though Srnicek is aware and critical of platforms scholars from other disciplines (2016, 1), he never appropriates their best insights or puts them in conversation with his own. Jonas Andersson Schwarz argues that platform studies must be multi-leveled and interdisciplinary to avoid the problems I outline here (Schwartz 2017, 387). I wager that if Srnicek had followed this approach, perhaps drawing on disciplines with different normative biases vis-a-vis platforms, it would have been easier to conceptualize the oppressive social relations of platform capitalism. Though Platform Capitalism is a work of critical political economy, it is more economy than politics; the road to liberation is not found within its pages.
References
Couldry, Nick, and Ulises A. Mejias. 2019. “Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject.” Television & New Media 20 (4): 336–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476418796632.
Fourcade, Marion, and Kieran Healy. 2017. “Seeing like a Market.” Socio-Economic Review 15 (1): 9–29. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mww033.
Postone, Moishe. 1998. “Rethinking Marx (in a Post-Marxist World).” In Reclaiming the Sociological Classics, edited by Charles Camic. Wiley-Blackwell. http://www.obeco-online.org/mpt.htm.
Schwarz, Jonas Andersson. 2017. “Platform Logic: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Platform-Based Economy.” Policy and Internet 9 (4): 374–94. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.159.
Srnicek, Nick. n.d. “Platform Capitalism | Wiley.” Wiley.Com. Accessed October 18, 2021. https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/Platform+Capitalism-p-9781509504862.
Winner, Langdon. 1980. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109 (1): 121–36.